In general, commercial buildings, research facilities, hospitals, manufacturing facilities and the like, have separate sources for utilities such as steam, water, natural gas, etc. In such buildings, backup systems, such as emergency generators, are generally designed to facilitate life safety and emergency evacuation situations. Rarely, if at all, are provisions made to provide temporary or emergency connections for all other services. As such, if hot water, steam or some other utility is needed, most likely there is no provision in the initial design of the building to make those connections for backup or emergency purposes.
For example, in a research facility if there is an ongoing experiment that requires an uninterrupted supply of steam to control the experiment, but a utility is shut down due to an emergency, equipment failure, etc., there are generally no provisions in place to make temporary connections. In such circumstances, if temporary provisions must be made, one may be forced to run temporary supply lines through an existing structure within the walls of the facility (e.g. ventilation areas), which is generally complicated and can become very expensive. Alternatively, temporary supply lines may be run outside of the walls. However, this leads to circumstances where the supply lines are visible to the occupants of the facility, and potentially exposes the supply lines to possible physical harm depending on the type of work undertaken in the facility, both of which are undesirable.
Another issue that is apparent when attaching a temporary utility supply to an existing building structure is that the manner of attaching such a supply may be highly dependent on the infrastructure of the building itself. This leads to safety concerns because an improper connection may cause adverse results, e.g. contamination of a water supply, mismatched phasing for electrical connections, and the like. Additionally, capital cost may need to be expended to actually add infrastructure to the building in order to facilitate temporary utility supplies. Depending on the specific temporary needs, such costs can become very prohibitive.